NINTENDO SWITCH REVIEW

The Nintendo Switch isn’t unlike a NASA spacecraft, in that nearly every part of it has been specially designed to pull double or even triple duty. The system’s modular design means that it has to function as a traditional home console, a portable system, and stand-alone touchscreen tablet with wireless controllers. Getting a piece of hardware to do that much while also making it easy to use and understand would be an engineering miracle, and although Nintendo has come close in some regards, it has fallen well short in others. Overall, the Switch is an attractive and powerful but oversized portable gaming system that struggles to be a convincing or reliable home console.

The first thing that struck me about the Switch is the overall quality of its look and feel. Regardless of whether you go for the neon blue and red set or the more subtle gray pair, the handsome matte finish of the two included Joy-Con controllers feels almost silken, begging to be touched. The console itself – the central tablet piece – is almost alarmingly small and thin when placed next to the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, or even the Wii U, but its mostly metal construction gives it a sturdy, substantial heft. At the same time, it’s still under a pound with both Joy-Con attached, making it comfortable to hold for long periods. (See the full dimensions and weight breakdown in our Nintendo Switch Wiki.) Even small details like the way the Joy-Con snap into place on the included Joy-Con Grip to form something resembling a conventional controller convey a premium feeling – the kind of gadget lust that has eluded Nintendo for generations now.

Dock and Grip

The Switch’s dock and the Joy-Con Grip are little more than two simple pieces of plastic that allow this handheld to dress up like a home console. The dock itself is as barebones as can be; it’s essentially just a combination HDMI and USB passthrough/charging station. It definitely works as advertised: within a couple of seconds of dropping the tablet onto the dock the picture transfers right over to the TV, and after detaching the Joy-Con (or syncing a separately purchased Pro Controller) you’re ready to play. The transition back to handheld mode is just as seamless – just grab the Switch out of the dock – which is definitely impressive. Even the time from startup to actually launching and playing a game is surprisingly short, and resuming from sleep is nearly instantaneous.

The Grip completes the Switch’s console transformation, housing the left and right Joy-Con to form what feels like the most traditional controller Nintendo has made since the Super Nintendo. This Voltron-esque configuration won’t be beating Sony’s Dual Shock 4 anytime soon, but it’s far more comfortable and functional than I’d imagined it would be from just looking at it.

The Joy-Con never felt quite like home the way a great controller should.

The smallish face buttons are sufficiently clicky and easy to hit, but the lack of a traditional D-pad or full-sized analog triggers will put it at a disadvantage for certain types of games. The Minus button (think Select or Back) is very oddly placed, though: it’s so small and so close to the left analog stick that I can barely hit the button without nudging the stick.

Speaking of the analog sticks, they work well enough but are notably limited in range of motion compared to competitors’ controllers because of their short height. It’s easy enough to adjust to these tiny quirks, but even once I did, the Joy-Con never felt quite like home the way a great controller should. The other notable limitation of the Grip is that there’s no way to charge the Joy-Con while they’re attached – if their charge runs out (after what Nintendo claims is 20 hours, but we’ve yet to successfully run them down) you must re-attach them to the tablet to charge them. Alternatively, you can buy the $30 Joy-Con Charging Grip.

Multi-touch Display

The Switch’s 6.2-inch, multi-touch, 720p LCD screen is a beauty. Color production is vibrant, and it’s bright enough to be played in indirect sunlight. Its generous viewing angles are a huge boon too, with a sweet spot large enough to make keeping an ideal picture easy. And even if you stray out of it, the picture remains visible in a roughly 120-degree arc – which is necessary when you’re playing multiplayer games in tabletop mode. Its touch functionality is leaps and bounds beyond the Wii U’s too, making it feel in line with the kinds of touch interfaces we’ve all grown accustomed to interacting with on iPads and Android tablets. There are areas where I could tell Nintendo had to make compromises to hit that $299.99 price tag, but the screen wasn’t one of them.

The Joy-Con

Apparently, the left Joy-Con is an area where Nintendo could’ve spent a little more. I’m not the only person experiencing de-syncs with it relatively often when playing with the Joy-Con detached (in or out of the Joy-Con Grip), leaving inputs temporarily unread until it reconnects a few seconds later. I’ve seen it happen occasionally with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – Link died more than a few senseless deaths this way – but more often when playing 1-2-Switch, which has several mini-games that require you to cover most of the Joy-Con with your hand, potentially interfering with its signal.

I even had this problem playing from the Joy-Con Grip a mere 10 feet away from the Switch console, forcing me to scooch up further on my bed in order to maintain a reliable connection. Distance appears to be a factor. I didn’t have any problems when I played the system in handheld mode with the Joy-Con docked directly to the hardware, though. In fact, for a variety of reasons, this became my preferred way to play (more on that later).

Individually, each Joy-Con can be turned sideways to be used as a simple controller. But their tiny size and awkward layout have to be fought against even when playing the most basic of games, like Super Bomberman R. Attaching the included wrist straps to them extrudes the shoulder buttons, making them a bit easier to hit, but they still require too much pressure to hit comfortably. Also, the left and right Joy-Con aren’t symmetrical. One has the buttons awkwardly pushed towards the center, while the other does the same to the analog stick instead, which means neither are in any way ideal to use.

MORE NINTENDO SWITCH REVIEWS

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• 1-2-SWITCH REVIEW

The Joy-Con controllers are packed with some nifty extra features that a creative developer might put to good use, though. Their motion-tracking accelerometers are highly accurate and responsive, which can be seen in games like 1-2-Switch, where you’re making precise movements like rotating slowly to pick locks. And the Ball Count mini-game made me a believer in what Nintendo calls HD Rumble, a form of articulated haptic feedback that actually did a great job of fooling me into perceiving weight and motion within my Joy-Con. The right one even has an infrared sensor that could eventually be used in interesting ways, and an NFC reader for scanning amiibo, which is already being put to good use.

Under the Hood

At the time of this writing, Nintendo has still not officially confirmed any exact specifications of the internals, but we now know that a custom version of the Nvidia Tegra X1 chipset powers the Switch. It’s a powerhouse by mobile standards, but it lacks the horsepower necessary to credibly compete with the now three-year-old PS4 and Xbox One. In fact, it’s hard to judge just how much of an upgrade it is over the four-year-old Wii U, based on specs alone. With 4GB, the Switch sports double the RAM of its predecessor (half of the PS4’s 8GB), but in terms of GPU and CPU clock speed, the numbers are surprisingly close, and not always in the Switch’s favor. The Switch’s premier launch game bears out this problem.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which was developed simultaneously for the Switch and the four-year-old Wii U, seldom quite makes it all the way to 30 frames per second in TV mode, and it even dips far south of that when lots of particles or physics objects are on screen at once. That it suffers from these performance issues despite a lack of anti-aliasing does not bode well for the system’s long-term capabilities – or its prospects for landing ports of big-budget AAA games.

These performance issues do not bode well for the system’s long-term capabilities.

Such performance issues would be somewhat understandable if Zelda was sporting gorgeous, high-resolution textures, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Despite its massive, sprawling open world, Zelda is housed in a tiny 13.4GB file, and on a big 1080p screen it becomes fairly obvious that many of the textures have been heavily compressed. We can’t be certain if that’s a consequence of larger game cards being more expensive for Nintendo to manufacture or of limited RAM on the Switch, but regardless of the cause, the symptoms are noticeable. The art style hides it well in Zelda’s case, but this may be a concern going forward, especially for potential multi-platform ports.

Transform and Roll Out

However, these issues are soothed quite a bit by playing in handheld mode. For Breath of the Wild, the Switch renders in 720p in handheld mode instead of TV mode’s 900p, so frame rates were more consistent despite the fact that the Switch’s GPU speed is clocked down significantly to save power when not docked. The compressed textures and lack of anti-aliasing were also far less impactful on the smaller screen and, combined with the lack of Joy-Con syncing problems, this made handheld mode my go-to when I wanted the best possible overall experience.

It's here where the lines between console and handheld begin to blur, and it’s in this space where Nintendo’s new platform shines the brightest. Since I can pick the Switch up and toss it in my backpack or just take it into the next room, things like having to give up the TV or traveling to work no longer interrupt my gaming. The Switch transforms to meet both needs remarkably quickly, especially if you have a separately sold Pro Controller hooked up and ready to go so you can skip the step of assembling or disassembling the Joy-Con Grip. It only takes the Switch a few seconds to output an image on my TV after dropping the console into its dock.

When the ideal use case arises, the Switch can be a truly compelling piece of hardware.

I’ve already had the grin-inducing experience of playing the same Zelda on the morning train as I was in my living room the night before, and I can’t imagine that it will get old. I already get excited about PS4 games that are cross-buy and cross-save with the Vita, but Switch games all function that way by default, and not just for small-scale indie games. At one point while playing Zelda in handheld mode in the living room I randomly decided to detach the Joy-Con and stand the screen up on my coffee table to play Snipperclips with my girlfriend. After an hour or so we decided to migrate to another room, where we continued playing on the TV without a hitch. This is the real promise of the Switch’s concept, and when the use case arises, it can be a truly compelling piece of hardware despite its problems.

Stuck Between Worlds

Where its power is perhaps questionable as a home console, the Switch is a monster by handheld gaming standards. It’s on a whole different level compared to the Vita or the 3DS – more so than you’d expect for a five-years-newer piece of hardware. Typically, power like this comes at a much higher price, or can’t be held comfortably in your hands. The Switch hits a sweet spot of power, affordability, and relative portability that few other mobile devices have yet managed, and the ones that share that space don’t have games like Zelda on them. That balance is the system’s most impressive feat.

Even then, though, there are compromises that caused problems when I tried to treat the Switch as a traditional handheld. With both Joy-Con docked on the sides the Switch is far too large to fit into all but the deepest of pockets, which keeps it from feeling truly portable in the way the 3DS, the DS, or even the original GameBoy are. And despite its bulk and corresponding battery size, it consumes power at an alarming rate, to the point where you can only play Zelda on the go for a couple of hours at a time unless you’re within a foot or two of a power outlet or USB battery pack. I was able to squeeze closer to three hours out of it by turning down the screen brightness, but that won’t suffice on long drives or flights (especially during the day). I did get better results on less graphically intensive games, such as Snipperclips: Cut it Out, Together! and I Am Setsuna, netting five hours and change at above-average screen brightness. At very least, it charges quickly, reaching 85% from being totally depleted in under two hours during one test.

The Switch's power is questionable as a home console, but it's a monster by handheld gaming standards.

Even if the Switch’s questionable internals and control issues don’t dissuade you from using it like a gaming console, it suffers numerous other inconveniences when it’s hooked up to your TV. The most glaring is that there is no way to lay the system on its side while docked, which is particularly irritating given that the game card slot, headphone jack, headphone volume controls, and power button are all along the top of the system. If you, like many people, keep your consoles in an entertainment system of some kind with shelves, there simply isn’t a convenient way to get to any of this stuff.

Sadly, this is far from the only practical frustration I ran into. If you wanted to opt for some premium wireless headphones, you can’t because there is no optical port on the Switch. There’s no Ethernet port either, which forces you to use wireless internet connections over 802.11ac unless you buy a USB Ethernet adapter. And though the dock has three standard USB ports on it where you can plug in that adapter and other accessories, the Switch itself docks and charges through a single USB-C port at the bottom of the tablet, which requires a different cable.

Because that USB-C port is on the bottom, there’s an odd conflict: you cannot charge the Switch if you’ve propped it up with its built-in (and rather flimsy) kickstand to use as a shared screen for multiplayer games like Super Bomberman R, where up to four people can play with one Joy-Con (or another controller) a piece. It’s not a massive deal, but it highlights the push and pull that typifies the system. It’s trying to be so many things at once that it can’t pull any of them off perfectly.

Quite possibly the largest issue is the woeful lack of on-board storage. With only 32GB, seven of which are permanently used by the operating system, there’s no way you’ll be able to go digital with your library unless you buy a hefty SD card. Given that the upcoming Dragon Quest Heroes is the same size as the Switch’s entire internal storage, it’s surprising that Nintendo didn’t at least offer an option for a system with a more respectable storage capacity.

As for the UI, it’s clean and snappy, but not in any way a standout. Unfortunately, as of right now, there isn’t any additional functionality in terms of video streaming or internet browsing, and we still have no word on when the Virtual Console will launch either. The lack of save-data management options really hurts too; all saves are infuriatingly bound to the hardware, with no way to transfer them physically or through Nintendo’s barebones online service.

Speaking of, Friend Codes are still a thing; an annoying, archaic thing as ever on Nintendo’s platforms. What’s not a thing is voice chat of any kind, and it won’t be until some time in the Fall, at which point Nintendo will support it only via an app for phones and tablets rather than through the Switch itself. Some of this may change in the future, but until that happens, the Switch can’t fill the same all-around home entertainment role that its competitors play so well.

All of these little omissions and issues make the Switch feel less than ideal no matter which way you use it. But Joy-Con sync problems aside, it can be easy to overlook this stuff when you’re enjoying Zelda on your own personal screen in the car, or in bed while someone else uses the TV.

The Verdict

The Switch’s chameleon-esque ability to change between being a home console, a handheld, and a mobile party-game machine helps it rise above its individual shortcomings, but only to an extent. On the go, it’s a powerful piece of hardware with a gorgeous screen that’s a bit too large and power hungry to feel completely portable. As a console, it’s underpowered, unreliable, and lacking in basic features and conveniences that all of its competitors offer. It’s nicely built and cleverly designed to be used in a variety of ways, but ultimately, the Switch doesn’t do any one of the many things it can do without some sort of significant compromise.

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